INF may call new meeting to re-elect the President

INF-FNI may call a new election for the position of President, according to a letter to the Legal Council of the INF-FNI written by Vice President & Secretary Jean Peters on 25 November and circulated to the member federations on 3 December 2016.

According to Jean Peters, the Italian, the Austrian, the Luxembourg, and the Swiss naturist federations lodged complaints after the election on 19 November 2016 in New Zealand where the delegates voted in favor of Armand Jamier to replace the outgoing President Sieglinde Ivo. (Read separate article.)

The Secretary takes the blame upon himself for allowing a few irregularities to take place.

First, he says, he allowed Jamier Armand to transfer to a participating French observer to vote on behalf of France as he himself together with Sieglinde Ivo left the room during the voting procedure. As only delegates can vote, that would leave the French votes invalid.

Secondly, he says that he first announced the election result as 103 for Armand and 99 for Sieglinde based on information from one of the scrutineers. As this did not add up to the total votes of 203, he asked the scrutineers again and was now told by the other scrutineer that the vote for Armand was actually 104. According to the rules, if the scrutineers do not agree, the voting must be repeated.

"But there is worse," Jean Peters writes.

"Since the Danish delegate had to leave the audience before the voting, he transferred his 4 votes to the New Zealand Federation (NZNF), which was acceptable."

"But during the votes, we noticed that another federation (Thailand) also used the proxies of the Finns and Norwegians conferred to the Danes, as the total of the votes remained unchanged at 203 votes! However, it should be mentioned that these proxies were established exclusively in the personal name of the Danish Federation and cannot therefore be transmitted to a third federation without the explicit consent of the respective federations!"

As I - Gregers Moller representing Thailand - am here being accused of having cheated by sneaking to use the votes of the Finns and the Norwegians (actually it was the Swedish and the Norwegian votes, not the Finnish votes - they were held by the Hungarian delegate), I asked Jean Peters to distribute my account of what happened to the member federations as well as to the Legal Council. My letter said:

"You must be aware that this transfer of the Norwegian and the Swedish votes to me was approved by INF-FNI V-P-Secretary Jean Peters prior to the session. It was furthermore repeated in the plenum at the departure of the Danish delegate with the question if anybody had any problems with that. The plenum also accepted the transfer of the Danish votes to the New Zealand delegate."

I also explained that the Danish delegate transferred the votes to me with his clear instructions which candidate I should vote for.

"It goes without saying that I voted according to the mandate I was given. It is tempting to reveal here what effect it would have had if I had voted differently, but you will have to guess - unless you break the seal and recount the votes. The Thai vote was a single vote and my anonymity would then be violated, but I hereby give my permission to that."

I asked Jean Peters to distribute my reply via the same email list as was used to distribute the accusation, but I was told to wait for the ruling of the Legal Council.

Clearly, the speculation here is, that Armand was only elected because Thailand "sneaked" to use the 6 Norwegian votes and the 7 Swedish to vote for him. But in fact these 13 votes were cast for Sieglinde. If you count them out, her defeat would have been 83 for Sieglinde and 104 for Armand.

Given a 21 vote difference, it is unlikely that a repeat of the election will bring about another result. But the attempt to discredit me as the representative for Thailand tells a lot about the naked politics of the INF and its players.

Jean Peters has also asked the Legal Council to rule on from which date Armand Jamier will be the President. The preliminary reply is that it depends on what was normal in the past. Either the transition should be by year end on 31 December with the new president taking over on 1 January - or else it should be immediately upon his election, but since it was not Armand who closed the meeting but Jean Peters on behalf of Sieglinde, it should probably follow the calendar year.

That leaves the INF another three weeks to organize a re-election .. or to be more precise: a repeat of the election.

Previous news on the INF-FNI:

https://thailandnaturist.com/newsroom/inf-new-president-new-focus/

https://thailandnaturist.com/newsroom/second-day-of-inf-is-there-a-battle-within/

https://thailandnaturist.com/newsroom/inf-struggling-ro-restructure/